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ppod

2,439 karma · joined January 31, 2011

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ppod··on My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
Slightly off-topic but a question I've been wanting to ask: as someone with a terrible sense of direction, the most important feature in a phone for me is the accuracy of the little arrow on the map that shows me which way I'm facing. I'm an android user, and it kind of shows a blue "cone of uncertainty" when it isn't sure which way its pointing, and occasionally asks either to move the phone in a figure of eight or to point at nearby building to calibrate.

What is the limiting factor here, technologically? Are iPhones better than android? Is it the hardware (accelerometer?!, compass?), the GPS signal, the software? It still, quite often, seems to get confused and show the cone in the wrong direction. It's so important to me that I would almost switch to iPhone if it definitely works better.

ppod··on Optical Transformers
>one is essentially left with a CPU

CPU? Ooh you lucky, lucky sod. Back in my day, you wanted an OR gate you had to string some NANDS together.

ppod··on I Asked ChatGPT to Explain Some Jokes to Me
I'd love to hear the opinion of someone who has really good knowledge and experience of how byte-pair encoding works in models like these. I think I agree with you that in theory it should be able to build a phonology from the amount of explicitly rhyming material in its training corpus, but for whatever reason it doesn't do this or at least doesn't do it consistently.

I've spend a long time testing this in ChatGPT, and no matter what I do it still gives results like this (paraphrasing here because it's down right now):

>What words rhyme with coffee? > doff happy toffee snuff duff

> Does "snuff" rhyme with "coffee"? >

Yes because they both share the 'o' vowel sound.

ppod··on Merriam-Webster and Unstructured Data Processing
Here's one I've come across before: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/~mtemms/Papers/neologism.pdf

edit more recent version: https://aclanthology.org/C16-1129/

ppod··on A farmer’s hunch led to a lost monastery and a Neolithic surprise
There is a really good government site for showing the location of all these ancient things. (you have to zoom in quite far before the dots appear)

https://maps.archaeology.ie/HistoricEnvironment/

ppod··on Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
It seems to understand a fair bit about themes and rhythm but it just cannot do rhyme. Something to do with the token encoding.
ppod··on Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal
>There's no debate on whether bargaining collectively leads to greater leverage in negotiation overall. It clearly does

Totally! That's why I want to be pro-union. I don't know much about NBA, but I don't think I'm a top 10th percentile developer. It just sometimes seems like all the unions fight for is the bottom 10th percentile.

ppod··on Amazon is intimidating and harassing organizing workers in Montreal
Because it's vague and hearsay. The most frustrating thing about these debates is that the pro-union side are so hostile to anyone who questions anything, as though they assume that anyone who doubts the union must be a business owner. I'm a worker, I would like to be part of a union that worked. But I don't see unions that work, I just see unreasonable and propaganda-like articles like these. When there is a dispute, if I try to look at it dispassionately, I usually find that I disagree with the union. So where does that leave me if I want to improve my rights as a worker?
ppod··on The world’s largest bee and the cautionary tale of its rediscovery
If you're saying that the bee had it coming - we all got it coming, kid.
ppod··on Omega Swatch Speedmaster
Makes you think, maybe Pluto lost the battle but won the war in the hearts and minds.
ppod··on Reddit can't build a better search engine
The structure of reddit really works well for preventing shilling from being a fatal problem. Namespaces moderated by genuine enthsuasists gain more users, and even if they are infiltrated, there is this constant evaluation of subreddits and posts by subscriber numbers and upvotes. It's a darwinian ecosystem with constant speciation and competition among subreddits.
ppod··on Ask HN: What did Marc Andreessen mean by this?
I could not agree more with you. Do you have any tips for other places? Even any good subreddits? The only way I can find the old energy now is certain twitter hubs, but I suspect there is a lot on discord.

And on the topic of the post:

"The financial measures bring crowdfunding platforms under terror-finance oversight, authorize Canadian banks to freeze accounts suspected of funding the blockades and suspend insurance on vehicles in the protests, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said."

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-police-respons...

ppod··on More people died of superbacteria in 2019 than HIV or malaria, study suggests
> Our approach can be divided into five broad components: number of deaths where infection played a role, proportion of infectious deaths attributable to a given infectious syndrome, proportion of infectious syndrome deaths attributable to a given pathogen, the percentage of a given pathogen resistant to an antibiotic of interest, and the excess risk of death or duration of an infection associated with this resistance

The headline that you wrote phrases this as "died of superbacteria", does this relate to the number where an infection played a role or the number attributable to a given pathogen?

ppod··on I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something (2020)
Yes I think that was it, thanks.
ppod··on I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something (2020)
There was a great little tool that I think used to be in Ubuntu, but possibly another distro, where you could press a keyboard combo, and it would turn the cursor into a little crosshairs, and then if would kill the app running whatever window you clicked on. I don't remember what it was called, anyone know?
ppod··on Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
An excellent paper on this issue here: https://aclanthology.org/J08-3010.pdf

Agree with other comments on CRAPL, but you should release it.

ppod··on Fifteen years of Ringo Starr's computer art
Dylan occasionally produced exceptional vocal performances https://youtu.be/pxr22ih0r9A?t=19
ppod··on Evidence for a mouse origin of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant
>Natural immunity doesn't seem to be very useful against covid. Or, at least, not more useful than the vaccines we already have

Do you have any evidence for that? The question has obviously become politicised. Experts figure out what information they think might make people more relaxed or careless about covid, and heavily push the reverse line. It's no wonder people's trust in experts is failing.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/24/which-...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

ppod··on The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)
Some of his writing in this reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace (who is mentioned), in particular the way he is deeply concerned with seeming humble but feeling egotistical: self-consciously projecting humility but being aware of the humility as a kind of affectation in a recursive and tortuous cycle of self-awareness.
ppod··on Myths about the brain
The article sets up a bit of a straw man (or maybe a motte-and-bailey) I think, because it says "all mammal brains (and most likely, all vertebrate brains as well) are built from a single manufacturing plan using the same kinds of neurons."; but I'm not sure that really refutes the notion that most of us have when we think of the lizard brain. Ontology doesn't recapitulate phylogeny, but we do have a cerebellum, and our actions and reactions happen along a broad spectrum of temporal control and conscious awareness.
ppod··on Myths about the brain
I agree with the other comments in here: this article takes several complex, long-running debates (modularity vs connectionism, predictive vs feedforward processing, dualism/monism) and reduces them to simplistic flamebait answers that come down definitively on one side. It's really the worst kind of popular science writing, because it's overconfident and dismissive of the opposing view rather then separating the debate out into appropriate parts that can be tackled with evidence-based research.
ppod··on My parents collect cans for a living
Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick says "my gorge rises at it"
ppod··on Stephen Wolfram – re:Clojure Keynote [video]
I do understand the pushback on Wolfram's egotism and self-branding stuff, but he is absolutely wonderful to listen to and still comes across as a bit of a genius. I think history will be kind to him.
ppod··on The OBS project has accused Streamlabs of copying their name and trademark
Same here, was fairly new to OBS this year and I downloaded both thinking they were slightly different products from the same team.
ppod··on Is there such a thing as good taste?
The whole point of conceptual art is that reproduction of figurative art is trivial now, so we move up a level. It's easy to reproduce the dot, but it's the conceptual move to dotness that's non-trivial. These ideas are 60 years old (Walter Benjamin) and you're doing a bit of a Two Cultures in reverse by being this simplistic about it.
ppod··on Facebook chooses profits over people
>In a rare display of anger, Cook replied that there were many things Apple did because they were right and just. “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he added, “I don’t consider the bloody ROI.” Then he added, “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”

That anti-profit dollar, that's a good dollar.

ppod··on A new link to an old model could crack the mystery of deep learning
The explanations in quanta magazine are so good. They are more in depth than a usual pop-sci article, but very followable.
ppod··on Birds Have a Mysterious 'Quantum Sense'. Scientists Have Now Seen It in Action
>And there's evidence that even though it's not conscious, humans are actually still capable of detecting Earth's magnetism.

There's nothing totally convincing on this is there? I followed the links and it seems to just be modulating EEG responses. That's not the same as "humans are capable of detecting". It's possible to measure unconscious capabilities behaviourally, e.g in blindsight experiments.

ppod··on [dead]
>Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.

This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?

ppod··on E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
Is there any kind of projector display might would work for this?
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